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Industry fears chemicals agency will struggle to cope

The EU’s first-ever chemicals agency will open for business next week (3 June), but industry leaders are concerned that it is not ready to begin the mammoth task of registering 30,000 chemicals.

The Helsinki-based agency was set up under the EU’s Registration Evaluation and Authorisation and Restriction of Chemical Substances (REACH) regulation, which will be phased in over the next 11 years. From 1 June companies will have six months to pre-register their chemicals, a process that allows them special transitional arrangements before full registration.

But the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) is unlikely to have its software fully ready, preventing companies from registering all their chemicals in one step. Erwin Annys, director of REACH and chemicals policy at the European Chemical Industry Council (Cefic), said that if a “bulk upload tool” was not available soon it would cause “major problems”, for multinationals and for small- and medium-sized chemical firms.

Willem Jetten at Dow Chemicals Europe said: “We really need a tool for global upload or at least certainty about its availability.” Pre-registering chemicals one by one would be “very time consuming”, he said.

A spokesman at the agency said he would not speculate on when the software would be fully up and running, adding that the agency would publish this information on Friday (30 May) once final tests have been completed. He said: “Time is the worst enemy for all of us whatever side of the regulation you are on. The regulation has extremely ambitious timelines and that is not ideal for the agency either.”

The European Commission estimates that 180,000 files will be submitted under the pre-registration process. Matti Vanhanen, Finnish prime minister, José Manuel Barroso, European Commission president, and Günter Verheugen, the industry commissioner, will attend the official opening of the agency on Tuesday.